Prosecutors: Anderson kept changing stories in killings

Saturday

Mar 17, 2012 at 12:01 AMMar 17, 2012 at 5:03 PM

Jurors listened to several hours of audio recordings of interviews with Dickie E. Anderson Jr. Friday, as the Anderson murder trial moved into the fourth day of testimony, and prosecutors tried to establish a pattern of inconsistent statements.

GREG SMITH

Jurors listened to several hours of audio recordings of interviews with Dickie E. Anderson Jr. Friday, as the Anderson murder trial moved into the fourth day of testimony, and prosecutors tried to establish a pattern of inconsistent statements.

To start the trial, state prosecutors had focused on the discovery of the bodies of two strangled women — Renee Pellegrino in 1997 and Michelle Comeau in 1998. Anderson has pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder in their deaths.

Friday’s testimony fast-forwarded the case to 2010, when cold case investigators went back to question Anderson about some of the prior statements he had given.

By 2008, police said, they had already established Anderson had left out key facts, or openly lied, about his knowledge of Pellegrino. Anderson’s DNA in 2008 came up a match to DNA evidence taken from Pellegrino’s body. That evidence, police said, led to Anderson’s confession that he had had sex with Pellegrino twice, on the night before and on the morning Pellegrino was found strangled and left naked on a Waterford roadway.

On Friday, with Waterford police investigator David Viens III on the stand, prosecutor David J. Smith played audio of a follow-up interview with Anderson in 2010. Viens and another investigator questioned Anderson about a man identified only as “Darrell,” who Anderson said was with him and Pellegrino on the morning she was found dead.

Anderson said he had sex with Pellegrino in the basement of his sister’s apartment and Pellegrino left with Darrell, just hours before her body was discovered. In interviews played Friday, Anderson is heard flipping through a photo array in an attempt to identify Darrell, a man he claims worked with him at The Day newspaper in New London at the time. Police have never been able to locate that person.

Anderson also talked to police in another interview in 2010 to explain that he remembered how he happened to be in the area of Cross Road in Waterford at 12:27 a.m. on June 4, 1997, three weeks prior to Pellegrino’s murder. Cross Road is adjacent to Waterford Parkway South, where Pellegrino’s body was discovered.

While Anderson initially denied it was him, he reported to police in that 2010 interview that “he was able to remember it was him,” Viens said.

In the audio recording, Anderson explains that he was at the movie theater and was dropped off by his brother-in-law. Anderson’s brother-in-law called the claim a “bold-face lie,” and laughed at the suggestion, according to police reports.